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Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself about the Poetics of Space by Peter Sloterdijk-
April 4, 2010 Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself about the Poetics of Space by Peter Sloterdijk
(Harvard University Graduate School of Design, February 17, 2009)

Mr. Sloterdijk, as part of your trilogy on the spheres,1 you set out to create a theory that construes
space as a key anthropological category. Why this emphasis?
We have to speak of space because humans are themselves an effect of the space they create. Human evolution
can only be understood if we also bear in mind the mystery of insulation/island-making [Insulierungsgeheimnis]
that so defines the emergence of humans: Humans are pets that have domesticated themselves in the incubators of
early cultures. All the generations before us were aware that you never camp outside in nature. The camps of
man’s ancestors, dating back over a million years, already indicated that they were distancing themselves from their
surroundings.
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In the third volume of your trilogy there is an extensive chapter on architecture, “Indoors:
Architectures of Foam.” Why did you choose such a provocative metaphor?
First of all for a philosophical reason: We are simply not capable of continuing the old cosmology of ancient Europe
that rested on equating the house and home with the world. Classical metaphysics is a phantasm on an implicit
motif that was highlighted in only a few places, e.g., by Hegel and Heidegger, namely that the world must itself be
construed as having the character of a house and that people in Western culture should be grasped not only as
mortals, but also as house residents. Their relation to the world as a whole is that of inhabitants in a crowded
building called cosmos. So the questions are, “Why should modern thought bid goodbye to this equation of world
and house? Why do we need a new image in order to designate how modern man lives in social and architectural
containers? Why do I propose the concept of foams?” The simple answer is: Because since the Enlightenment we
have no longer needed a universal house in order to find the world a place worthy of inhabiting. What suffices is a
unité d’habitation, a stackable number of inhabitable cells. Through the motif of the inhabited cell I can uphold the
spherical imperative that applies to all forms of human life but does not presuppose cosmic totalization. The
stacking of cells in an apartment block, for instance, no longer generates the classical world/house entity, but an
architectural foam, a multi-chambered system made of relatively stabilized personal worlds.
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Is this deterioration of the world house or the all-embracing sphere into foam bubble an image of
entropy?
On the contrary, in modernity far more complexity is established than was possible under the classical notion of
unity. We must not forget that metaphysics is the realm of strong simplifications, and thus has a consolatory effect.
The structure of foam is incompatible with a monospherical mindset; the whole can no longer be portrayed as a
large round whole. Let me use an anecdote to indicate the immense change: In his memoirs, Albert Speer
recollects that the designs for the giganto-manic new Reich Chancellery in Berlinoriginally envisaged a swastika
crowning the dome, which was to be over 290 meters high. One summer’s day in 1939 Hitler then said: “The
crown of the largest building in the world must be the eagle on theglobe.” This remark should be taken as attesting
to the brutalist restoration of imperial monocentric thinking—as if Hitler had for a moment intervened in the agony
of classical metaphysics. By contrast, around 1920, in his reflections on the fundamentals of theoretical biology
[Theoretische Biologie], Jakob von Uexküll had already affirmed: “It was an error to believe that the human world
constituted a shared stage for all living creatures. Each living creature has its own special stage that is just as real
as the special stage the humans have. . . . This insight offers us a completely new view of the universe as
something that does not consist of a single soap bubble which we have blown up so large as to go well beyond our
horizons and assume infinite proportions, and is instead made up of millions of closely demarcated soap bubbles
that overlap and intersect everywhere.” Le Corbusier himself used the image of the soap bubble in order to explain
the essence of a good building: “The soap bubble is completely harmonious, if the breath in it is spread equally, and
well regulated on the inside. The outside is the product of an inside.”2 This statement could be taken as the axiom
of spherology: Vital space can only be explained in terms of the priority of the inside.
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In your exploration of the “Architectures of Foam,” you write that modernity renders the issue of residence explicit.
What do you mean by that?
Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project He starts from the
anthropological assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same
time he seeks to emancipate this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question:How does
capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge
technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing
protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of
prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Paxton’s Crystal Palace, erected in
London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyperinterior that offers a perfect expression of the
spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures.
The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a
closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This is what Benjamin
found so theoretically exciting: The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and at the
same time impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe. This sparks a trend that is perfected in 20th-
century apartment design as well as in shopping-mall and stadium design—these are the three paradigms of
modernconstruction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors.
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Le Corbusier once said that we had to choose between revolution and architecture. He decided in favor of
architecture. In your interpretation does that mean that he voted for the explication of residential conditions?
Revolution is simply the wrong word chosen to describe explication. An engineer always opts for the better
technology. Everything successful is operational, while revolutionary phases achieve nothing as long as they do not
contain real potential abilities. Which is why no one today still asks what programs are being announced but what
programs are being written. Writing is an archetype of ability: The invention of script marks the beginning of the
operational subversion of the world as it exists. Only that is effective which popularizes getting a new handle on
things. Incidentally, modern apartments are full of technical appliances that explicate life in the household: Current
tools no longer have handles, because handles belong to an outdated stage—they have given way to devises with
buttons: We have arrived in the world of finger-tip operations.
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To return to Benjamin again: To what extent should we read his reference to the major interiors as an explication of
capitalism?
Just as Freud tried to make persons’ dreams explicit, Benjamin proposed a kind of dream interpretation of
capitalism. My explicative work refers to the spatial dynamism of human being-in-the-world. I want to showhow
every shape of created space entails a problem of projection. Humans are animals who like to move, who change
rooms, space, indeed even the element in which they live. They always live while on the move from A to B and
back again, to quote Andy Warhol, and they are the way they are because they always take with them into each
new space the memory of a different space they previously were in. In other words, you cannot create an
absolutely neutral space, and you cannot invent a completely new space, you always generate differential spaces
that are outfitted in distinction from a different, former space. Homo sapiens possesses a projective dynamism that
stems from the fact that our species is equipped with memories of prenatal situations.
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I am right in thinking this prenatalism is the leitmotif in the first section of your Spheres project, which you have
entitled “Bubbles”?
Spheres I is essentially dedicated to elaborating a strong concept of intimacy. To this end I develop an explicitly
regressive movement in order to approach the topic of being-in, in reverse gear (as it were). I first address the
phenomenon of inter-faciality. Let me explain: If people look at each other, a non-trivial space arises that cannot be
construed as physical or geometric—inter-facial space. Here it does not help if I take a tape measure to determine
the distance between the tip of my nose and your nose. The interfacial relationship creates a quite unique spatial
relationship. I describe the latter in terms of mother/child interfaciality, something we can study in the animal
kingdom, too. In my next step I try and interpret the images of the intercordial relationships that arise when people
are attuned to each other affectively so that two hearts form a resonant space together—here, the metaphorical
factor increases. And then I tiptoe up to the most intimate of relationships, that between mothers and children: In
the process, I explicate how women are architectural units—at least if seen from the perspective of the nascent life.
Women’s bodies are apartments! Now behind this rather shocking thesis we find a fairly dramatic perspective on
natural history. Among insects, reptiles, fish and birds—i.e., among the vast majority of species—the fertilized egg,
the carrier of genetic information, gets laid in an outside setting that must vaguely possess the properties of an
external uterus or nest. Now something quite incredible happens in the evolutionary line that leans to mammals:
The body of the female members of the species is defined as an ecological niche for her progeny. This leads to a
dramatic turn inwards in evolution. What we see is a dual use of the female members of a species, as it were:
Henceforth they are no longer only egg-laying systems (in a metabiological sense, femininity means the successful
phase of an ovulation system), but they lay the eggs within themselves and make their own body available as an
ecological niche for their progeny. In this way, they become integrated mother animals. The result is a type of event
that had not existed in the world before: birth. It is the proto-drama that shapes the departure from the primary
total setting to arrival as an individual. Thus, birth is a biologically late type of event and has ontological
consequences. The expression to be born” emphasizes the animal side; the expression “to see the light of day”
stresses the existential difference. A very explicit logic is required to explain this.
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Are you saying that the projection of this primary basic experience is operative in all later architectural activities?
Exactly. Here the creative side to projection emerges. Projection evidently does not refer, as in psychoanalysis, just
to feelings (i.e., confused affects) but to process of spatial creation per se. If we thus ask: What interiors will living
beings wish to have if they bear within them the marks of being born? Then the answer must be: They will no
doubt opt for interiors that enable them to project a trace of that archaic state of protection onto their later shell
constructions. The construction of shells for life creates a series of uterus repetitions in outdoor milieus. Architects
must understand that they stand in the middle between biology and philosophy. Biology deals with the
environment, philosophy with the world.
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But that does not explain the great diversity of human spatial needs. Not all individuals pass on the wish for an
archaic state of protection in this shape. When in small spaces, many people feel locked in and develop
claustrophobic responses. We could divides people into the cave dwellers and the tree dwellers—for the one, it is
the love of the shell the counts, for the other the love of spaciousness.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. The spheres theory does not seek to explain everything. It is not a universal
theory, but an explicit form of spatial interpretation. Incidentally, you can account for all manner of different types of
space from the vantage point of prenatality—wide oceanic spaces on the one side and hellishly confined spaces on
the other. Spheres I addresses microspherological phenomena in general. I understand microspherology as the
general theory of the interior. These phenomena are always interpersonal in structure, and the dyadic relationship
offers me the paradigm here. I show how we should construe thehuman dyad and follow it back as far as prenatal
proto-intersubjectivity. The discovery here is that initially it is not so much a mother/child, but a child/placenta
relationship. The original doubling takes place at a prepersonal level, by the bond formed by the so-called psycho-
acoustic umbilical cord. Here, I draw on the thought of Alfred Tomatis and other authors who have ploughed this
tricky field.3 They regard the fetal ear as the organ of primary bonding. That is quite irritatingly exciting for those
who accept the postulates and nonsense for those who do not believe there is an issue here.
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And what role does the act of explication play here?
Explication is a matter not just of the conceptual instruments that we deploy to illuminate the phenomena of life—
such as dwelling, working, and loving—it is not just a cognitive process. Rather, it has to do with realelaboration.
That can only be achieved using an expressive logic or a logic of production. Needless to say, here I’m following in
the tradition of Marxist and/or pragmatist anthropology. If it is true that all of natural history is necessary in order to
explain the formation of the human hand (or rather the difference between a paw and a hand), then it is likewise
true that we need all of cultural history to explain the difference between noises and languages. Not everything that
implicitly exists needs to be rendered explicit. An explication covers only those parts of the context of life that can
be technically reconstructed. The assumption underlying my undertaking is a metabiological proposition: What we
call technology rests on the attempt to replace implicit biological and social immune systems by explicit social
immune systems. You need to understand what you want to replace better than a mere user understands it. If you
wish to build a prosthetic, you have to be able to define the function of the organ to be replaced more precisely
than if you use the original. Here you move from the actual functional statement to the level of the general and
then back to the possible functional equivalent. And you can recognize functionalists by the fact they always ask
two questions: at first, “What does the system achieve in its current form?” and at the end, “What could be done
instead?”
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Architects are pretty good at this. When they build a private residence they ask: What features should this intimate
space have? What should it be able to do? It is above all a protective space, one that provides relief. How can we
represent it with technical means? Architects would probably think, “We need to build cuddly spots!”
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And that would probably not be far off the mark. If you ask what a cuddly spot represents, then in terms of
functional analysis you arrive at the concept of the “primacy of the secluding atmosphere.” And if you have
recognized the primacy of such a secluding atmosphere, indeed the primacy of the atmospheric per se, then
architects can definitely infer from this that they cannot take geometric ideologies as their starting point .Instead,
they need to think in terms of the atmospheric effect of space.
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That calls for a strong act of translation. Intimacy is an inter-subjective category that can be
expressed spatially in many different ways.
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As said, I construe inter-subjectivity as a non-physical spatial relationship. Creatures of the human type can,
through being together, generate the effect of reciprocal accommodation. As the example of a pair of lovers
clearly shows, lovers are in one or another way already together; they are, when they are together, to a
certain extent in each other. Meaning that the classic question “My place or yours?” is actually superfluous.
Moreover, it offers a nice example of explication: This going-somewhere-together-as-already-being-together
is the kinetic explication of what the being-together of lovers implies. Because the two are implicitly already
together, they have a list of options of explicit localizations.
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You take the architectural example of the apartment to show what the process of explication can achieve as
regards modern residential living.
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I interpret apartment construction as the creation of a world island for a single person. To understand this, you
need to concede that the expression world not only means the big whole that God and other jovial observers have
before them. From the outset, worlds take the stage in the plural and have an insular structure. Islands are
miniatures of worlds that can be inhabited as world models. For this reason, one must know what constitutes a
minimally complete island, i.e., one capable of being a world. In my study on “insulations” [Insulierungen] I
distinguish between three different types of islands: the absolute island, such as a space station, which is placed as
a completely implanted lifeworld into a milieu inimical to life; then there are the relative islands like greenhouses for
plants—one need think only of the well-known experiment Biosphere II; and finally the anthropogenic islands, i.e.,
spaces built in such a way that humans can emerge in them. They form a self-insulating dynamic system
reminiscent of a human incubator. You insert apes and out come humans. And how it is that possible? How can, to
argue in a Darwinian and philosophical vein, apes enter into conditions of self-ness [Selbstverhältnisse]. How did
the anthropogenetic engine get kickstarted? I describe the human-generating island as a nine-dimensional space in
which each of the dimensions must exist for the human-generating effect to be triggered. If only one dimension is
absent, you do not get a complete human. It all starts with the chirotope, the place of the hand. And what does the
hand have to do with the genesis of the human? The answer to this question provides a first version of a theory of
action, an elementary pragmatics. I then tackle the phonotope, the space of sound in which groups that hear
themselves tarry. This is then followed by the uterotope, i.e., the space occupied by deeper-seated memberships or
of shared caves; the thermotope, the sphere of warmth or the space where you get spoiled; and the erototope, the
place of jealousy and the field of desire. I would like to note in passing on the latter that the emergence of species-
specific jealousy was extremely important for the genesis of human beings— for humans are mimetic animals that
have always watched what other humans do attentively and jealously, in fact, even aping those who successfully
behave as if they were not watching what the others were doing. The next dimensions are the ergotope, i.e., the
field of war and effort; the thanatotope, the space of coexistence with the dead in which religious symbols prevail;
and finally the nomotope, the space of the legal tensions that provide a group with a normative backbone.
Buckminster Fuller’s theorem of tensegrities gives an important role to this. From this general theory of islands we
can derive modern apartment culture, for an apartment will only function if it is convincing as a minimally complete
world island for an individual.
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It does not seem that, so far, this description contains the definition of residence, of the human being, as residential
being.
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You must understand that houses are initially machines to kill time. In fact, in a primitive farmhouse people wait for
a silent event out in the fields, one they cannot influence but which, thank God, happens regularly— namely the
moment when the seeds planted bear fruit. In other words, people initially only live in a house because they
confess to the conviction that it is rewarding to await an event outside the house. In the agrarian world, the
temporal structure of residing in houses must be understood in terms of the compulsion to wait. This kind of being-
in-the-house was first challenged in the course of the Middle Ages, when in Northwest Europe a wider ranging
urban culture had arisen again. Since then, a growing proportion of European populations have been seized by a
culture of impatience or not-being-able-to-wait. During Goethe’s day, in Germany only 20% of the population was
urbanized, and 80% still lived under the old agrarian conditions. Heidegger, whom I would like, in this context, to
regard as the last thinker of rural life, continues to construe existential time as waiting time and thus also as
boredom. The event that this waiting leads to is of course something abysmally simple, namely the fact that things
on the tilled field become mature. The philosopher equates this tilled field with world history without bearing in
mind that the worlds of the cities can no longer assume the form of tilled fields. In the city, things do not mature,
they are produced. I move on from this definition of residential living as being-in-the-world put on hold and of the
house as a place of waiting onto the house as a place of reception, i.e., the location where the important wheat
gets sorted from the unimportant chaff. The original house is a habitation plant. By spending much time there you
unconsciously become a habitual unit with your surroundings; you inhabit by habit. Once that has been achieved,
the background has been created against which the unusual can first stand out. Residential living is in this regard a
dialectical practice—it makes itself useful for its opposite. In a third step, I develop the theory of embedding or
immersion. Here the philosophical theory of being-in, as originated by Heidegger, is moved forward. I answer the
question of what it means to be in something. How does that happen? I illustrate these questions by relying on
statements by Paul Valéry, who interpreted the being-in in terms of the paradigm of architecture: For him,
architecture means that men lock men into man-made works. Here we touch on the totalitarian side of the art of
building. Finally, as the fourth stage of explication, I expose the essential nerve center of the phenomenon of
residence, namely the house’s destiny as a spatialized immune system. Here, I focus specifically on the dimension
of designed atmosphere, the air we breathe in a building. Part of the adventure of Modern architecture is that it has
also rendered the apparently immaterial sides of being—namely human residence in an atmospheric setting—explicit
in technical and aesthetic terms. The modern art of dwelling will not be able to get back to an earlier level of
designing human containers. Once I have taken these steps, it becomes clear that what I mean when I claim that
the apartment (along with the sports stadium) is the primary architectural icon of the 20th century. A monadology
is needed to think the interior today. One man—one apartment. One monad—one world cell. . . . -
… and at the beginning of architectural Modernism the adage was: one unmarried person—one apartment.
Right. Modern apartment construction rests on a celibate-based ontology. Just as modern biology defines life as the
successful phase of an immune system, so we could, in architectural theory, define existence as the successful
phase of the one-person household. Everything is drawn into the inner sphere of the apartment. World and
household blend. If a one-person existence can succeed at all, it is only because there is architectural support that
turns the apartment itself into an entire world prosthetic. Early Modern architects were thus right to see themselves
as molders of humanity. If one ignores the shot of megalomania, what remains is the fact that the architects of the
one-person apartments have enabled the mass version of a historically singular type of human being—at best it was
otherwise prefigured by the Christian hermit monks.
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You describe the apartment as a studio of self-relationships. If we bear in mind that the history of humanity started
when hordes formed, with a rudimentary division of labor in hunting and in raising children, then the emergence of
this singular reproducing type of human, who can live almost autonomously, is slightly worrying. I have two
questions here: You just described intimacy, dyadic intimacy, as something that constitutes space. What of that
survives in the apartment culture? And are there no forms of coexistence that impact on space between the
extreme poles of single and mass, the solitary and the assembly?
The first question is easier to answer: The apartment individualists have discovered a process enabling them to
form pairs with themselves—incidentally, Andy Warhol, who I have already mentioned, was one of the first to
explicitly show this by claiming that he married his tape recorder. Modern autogamy involves choosing a stance of
“experiencing” one’s own life, i.e., viewing it judgmentally from the outside. Individuals in the age of a culture of
experience constantly seek difference from themselves. They can choose as their partner none other than
themselves as the inner Other. Strong individualism always presumes that you draw inwards the second pole and
the other poles that are part of a complete personality structure. The basis for this psychostructural move has long
since been given in European culture, and elements of it can be traced back to classical antiquity. The archetypal
example is the hermit monks who moved to the Theban desert, a few days’ journey south of Alexandria, in order to
pray. As far as we know, they led inner lives that featured many relationships; the most famous among them was
St. Anthony, who was visited by tormenting spirits so often that there can be no talk of him having lived alone. To
put it in modern words, he shared a pad with his hallucinations.
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Today, he would probably reside in a psychiatric ward, dosed to the gills with tranquilizers. How does this extreme
form of individuation differ from autism?
The autistic person does not possess the inner spaciousness that would enable him to be his own company. The
individual’s self-supplementation structure has deep media-anthropological roots and can only be explained in terms
of media history. The minimal formal condition of self-supplementation consists of the fact that a so-called
individual is integrated into a dyad—with a real or imaginary Other. The question of social life of the isolated
individual is harder: What happens to the small-group animal homo sapiens if he or she sits in pure individualist
form as the solitary inhabitant of his or her world apartment? Two possible answers would seem obvious: One is
that the individual on its own plays at being the entire horde. This implies the task of representing twelve or twenty
people within his or her inner world, members of at least three generations. Thus, in the absence of real Others, a
complete social structure has to be simulated.
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Psychology regards the formation of a multiple personality as a symptom of illness, a serious disturbance in
personality development.
From our point of view, the multiple personality is nothing other than the individual’s answer to the disappearance
of his or her real social surroundings, and is thus a plausible response to the chronic lack of social stimulation. The
second possibility relates to the modern practice of networking. The horde returns in the guise of an iPhone
address book. Close physical togetherness is no longer a necessary condition of sociality. The future belongs to
telesocialism. The past returns as tele-horde life.
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You use the heading “Dialectic of Modernization” to describe how society’s empty center is filled with illusionary
images of a center.
In Spheres III, I attempt to explain why we should not only purge the two portentous words revolution and mass
from our vocabulary, but also the concept of “society.” It suggests a coherence that could only be achieved by
violent asserting conformism. The conglomerate of humans that has, since the 18th century,called itself “society” is
precisely not based on the atomic dots that we tend to call individuals. Instead, it is a patchwork of milieus that are
structured as subcultures. Just think of the world of horse lovers—a huge subculture in which you could lose
yourself for the duration of your life but which is as good as invisible if you are not a member of it. There are
hundreds if not thousands of milieus in the current social terrain that all have the tendency from their own
viewpoint to form the center of the world and yet are as good as nonexistent for the others. I term them inter-
ignorant systems. And, among other things, they exist by virtue of a blindness rule. They may not know of one
another, since otherwise their members would be robbed of the enjoyment of being specialized members of a
select few. In terms of their profession, there are only two or three types of humans who can afford polyvalence in
dealing with milieus. The first are architects who (at least virtually) build containers for all; the second are the
novelists, who insert persons from all walks of lifeinto their novels; finally come the priests who speak at the burials
of all possible classes of the dead. But that is probably the entire list. Although, no, I forgot the new sociologists à la
Latour. In other words, the multiple personality on the one hand and the single networker on the other— those are
the two options I see open to individualized populations. The way homo sapiens is influenced by
the dowry from the days of hording is no doubt insurmountable, but because the explication of that old heritage
continues simultaneously in various directions, the proto-social elements of the life of sapiens can be reworked.
They lead to an electronic tribalism. In the dyadic motifs, by contrast, the intimate relationships are explicated to
such a degree that intimacy can quite literally be played through with the technical media of self-supplementation.
In the long run, human types arise that are fairly unlike what we have known to date.
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The heyday of the models you describe for the apartment, from early Modernism through to Kisho Kurokawa, and,
for urbanism, through to Constant, was in the 1960s. Then architecture changed direction, with the city back in
focus—namely the city as something intangible, indefinable, irreducible. The concept of the capsule disappears; the
city is then construed as fabric. The concept of the net marks the start of the onward march of postmodernism,
which leaves the utopian individualism of the 1960s on the sidelines.
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You’re right to the extent that the critique of capsule architecture means a critique of urban autism. But let me
point to a complementary risk. All the talk of nets and fabrics tends to neutralize existential space, and I think that
is as dangerous as capsule individualism. Net thinking includes only dots and interfaces that underlie the notion of
two or more intersecting lines or curves, giving you a worldview whose constitutive element is the dot. The net
theorists think in radically non-spatial terms, i.e., in two dimensions; they use the concept of anorexia to interpret
their relationship to their environment. Their graphics reveal that the individual world agency is seen as an
intersection between lines lacking volume. I, by contrast, go for the concept of foam bubble or the world cell in
order to show that even the individual element already contains intrinsic expansion. We should not revert to an
ontology of the dot, but take as the minimum variable in our thinking the cell that is capable of constituting a world.
A little more monadology cannot harm us: The monad is not a dot bereft of extension; it has the character of a
micro-world. “Cell” expresses the fact that the individual place has the shape of a world. The metaphor of the fabric
or net at best gives you minute knots, but you can’t inhabit a node. By contrast, the foam metaphor emphasizes the
microcosmic intrinsic spatiality of each individual cell.
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However, the metaphor implies a question: Where does it lead to if asked in the context of architecture? Architects
tend to take images literally.
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That happened ages ago. Frei Otto is one of the Modern architects who tried to derive nature-like or organomorphic
spatial structures from soap bubbles. The foam metaphor supports an intellectual virtue: It prevents us reverting to
the over-simplifying Platonic geometries that were transported by the traditional history of architecture. There are
no rectangular shapes in foam, and that is interesting news. And there are no longer any primitive spherical
structures, at least if foams pass beyond their wet or autistic stage. Withinthem, reciprocal forces of deformation
are always at work that ensure that we get structures that are not smooth and in which more complex geometric
rules prevail.
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What do you have against right angles?

The idea underlying this theory of diverse spaces can only be grasped if we also consider the reflection on
alternative load-bearing structures underpinning the spherology. We live in an age in which the function of classical
load-bearing structures based on pressure give way to structures based on tensile forces, i.e. integral units of
tension. I am of course thinking primarily of Buckminster Fuller’s well-known tensegrities, and of pneumatic edifices
and 20th-century air structures. The new logic of structures functions throughout beyond all walls and pillars.
Tensegrities form the technical transition from the metaphor of foam to modern buildings. Foam is a kind of natural
tensegrity, especially when it ceases to take the form of “individualistic” foam, in which, in a liquid solution,
individual bubbles float pass each other hardly touching. If a foam grows older and dry, a complex internal
architecture arises. Many bubbles burst; the residual air from the burst bubble then enters the adjacent bubbles,
and the foam dries up from within. Beautiful, morphologically discerning structures arise, polyhedron foams. They
are completely defined by the motif of co-isolation— which is to say the foam cell shares with its neighbor the fact
that it is separate from it; my walls are your walls. What joins us is that we have turned our backs on each other.
The concept of co-isolation is fundamental for the universe of foamy shapes. The adjacency of world projects or
living spaces within a coisolated structure has a quality different from the vicinity of spaces within traditional
segmented cultures. There, everything social is partialized—the world is a conglomerate of deserted yards. The
image of the sack of potatoes that Marx uses in his 18th Brumaire to describe the situation of the allotment
farmers in France is a prime description of the state of wet foam. Each cell floats past the other cells, blind to its
shared environment, not touching, for all their similarity.
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How much of the psychosocial constitution of space remains in the metaphor of foam, and what remains of the
constructivist side to constituting space?

Foam, in my opinion, is a very useful expression for what architects call density—itself a negentropic factor. Density
can be expressed in psychosocial terms by a coefficient of mutual irritation. People generate atmosphere by
mutually exerting pressure on one another, crowding one another. We must never forget that what we term
“society” implies the phenomenon of unwelcome neighbors. Thus, density is also an expression for our excessively
communicative state, and, incidentally, the dominant ideology of communication is repeatedly prompting us to
expand it further. Anyone taking density seriously will, by contrast, end up praising walls. This remark is no longer
compatible with classic Modernism, which established the ideal of the transparent dwelling, the ideal that inside
relationships should be reflected on the outside and vice versa. Today, we are again foregrounding the way a
building can isolate, although this should not be confused with its massiveness. Seen as an independent
phenomenon, isolation is one form of explication of the conditions of living with neighbors. Someone should write a
book in praise of isolation. That would describe a dimension of human coexistence that recognizes that people also
have an infinite need for non-communication. Modernity’s dictatorial traits all stem from an excessively
communicative anthropology: For all too long, the dogmatic notion of an excessively communicative image of man
was naively adopted. By means of the image of foam you can show that the small forms protect us against fusion
with the mass and the corresponding hypersociologies. In this sense, foam theory is a polycosmology. -

So each soap bubble is a cosmos unto itself?

No, that would again be an overly autistic construction. In truth, we have to do here with a discrete theory of
coexistence. All being-in-the-world possesses the traits of coexistence. The question of being so hotly debated by
philosophers can be asked here in terms of the coexistence of people and things in connective spaces. That implies
a quadruple relationship: Being means someone (1) being together with someone else (2) and with something else
(3) in something (4). This formula describes the minimum complexity you need to construct in order to arrive at an
appropriate concept of world. Architects are involved in this consideration, since for them being-in-the-world means
dwelling in a building. A house is a threedimensional answer to the question of how someone can be together with
someone and something in something. In their own way, architects interpret this most enigmatic of all spatial
prepositions, namely the “in.”
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Why do you think the preposition in is enigmatic?

Because it highlights both being-contained-in and being-outside. People are ecstatic beings; they are, to use
Heidegger’s terms, forever held outside in the open; they can never definitely be included in some container or
other—other than graves, that is. In the ontological sense, they are “outside” in the world, but they can only be
outside to the degree that they are stabilized from within from something that gives them firm support. This aspect
needs to be emphasized today in contrast to the current romanticism of openness. It is spatial immune systems
that enable us to give being-outside a tolerable form. Buildings are thus systems to compensate for ecstasy. Here,
the architect should be located, typologically speaking, in the same ranks as the priest and the therapist—as an
accomplice in repelling intolerable ecstasy. Incidentally, in this context Heidegger focuses less on architecture and
more on language, and it is indeed language in its habitual form that is a perfect agenda to compensate for an
undesired ecstasy. Since most people always say the same things all their lives, and their language games are, as a
rule, completely repetitive, we live in a world of symbolic redundancy that functions just as well as a house with
very thick walls. “Language is the house of being,” postulated Heidegger, and we are gradually understanding what
he meant when he came up with the phrase. Language is a staunch fortress in which we can ward off the open.
Nonetheless, we occasionally let visitors in. In human relationships, speaking and building usually create sufficient
security that you can now and then permit ecstasy. For this reason, from my viewpoint the architect is someone
who philosophizes in and through material. Someone who builds a dwelling or erects a building for an institution
makes a statement on the relationship between the ecstatic and the enstatic, or, if you will, between the world as
apartment and the world as agora.
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Notes
1. Sphären (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998–2004).
2 [Vers une Architecure, 1923.]
3. See A.A. Tomatis, The Conscious Ear (Paris: Station Hill Press,1991).